November 9, 2004

back in 1980, the Soviet Union was still intact. Who would have imagined that this empire was about to break only a few years after?
Here you see a church converted into a museum of the communist revolution.

Forever Young…

Only two years before his death, Leonid Brezhnev is presented as a young man.

… and even Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (name of war: “Lenin” - a reference to the Siberian river Lena…) looks like a young man.
Just to recall: 1980 was the year of the Olympics in Moscow that were boycotted by many Western states.
It also was the year that Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was banished.
Sakharov was one of the most renowned scientists the Soviet Union ever produced, contributed a lot to cosmology and was responsible for much of the Soviet Unions nuclear programme (actually, he also was known as the “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb”).
He won the the 1975 Nobel Peace Price for his fight for human rights.
Almost as well known as Sakharov himself was his wife Yelena Bonner, who was also banished at the same time.

I was often approached by Russians who wanted to discuss modern literature, be it Russian, American or German - intellectual curiosity was much stronger than the fear of an autocratic regime.